Yvonne Rust, QSM

Yvonne Rust, QSM, was a New Zealand pioneering potter, passionate arts teacher, and in later years, a prolific painter. (Photo by Patsy Deverall)

Born on 19 November 1922 in Whangarei, Northland, Yvonne Rust QSM was the only child of Gordon and Annie Rust (nee Buckhurst). Gordon was a Native Schools Headmaster working among Maori, and Annie was an accomplished artist who had been a tutor at Canterbury College of Art (today, Ilam School of Fine Arts attached to Canterbury University).

Yvonne’s early years were spent amongst Maori, and from 1928, in New Zealand’s northernmost community, Te Hapua, where she was the only white child. She spent most of her time with young Maori outside in the natural environment riding horses, digging shellfish, eeling, climbing trees, fishing, doing what they did. This led her to adopt a Maori perception of the natural world as a living body imbued with spirit. This world view remained with her for the duration of her life and it informed much of her work as she moved into art.

Rust graduated from Canterbury College of Art with a Dip.FA in 1946. She began teaching art in secondary schools just as Art was being introduced to the general curriculum for the first time under the aegis of Gordon Tovey and CE Beeby. At an art teacher’s refresher course in 1949 she was mesmerised by clay from the moment she watched a pottery demonstration by Robert Nettleton Field. It led to a life-long fascination with clay and pottery.

Rust set up the first New Zealand National Pottery School in 1956. It attracted 80 students and included tutors, Mirek Smisek, Patricia Perrin, Marion Mauger, and Carl Vendelbosch.

In 1965 as part of the Christchurch Arts Festival, she hosted Japanese Master Potter Shoji Hamada at her Colombo St studio.

She moved to Greymouth on the West Coast of the South Island in 1966, and introduced pottery made with local resources as a new income stream . Rust was presented in 1968 with the Silver Medal for Services to the Arts by the Canterbury Society of Arts.

In 1971 she moved to Tahunatapu Point near Whangarei in Northland. There she constructed an earth house that led to her instigation of an Earth-Building Code which is today cited on every earth-building in the country. She also instituted the Earth Building Association of New Zealand (EBANZ) which is still the only owner-builder voice in the country.

In 1972 Rust received a Fellowship for Services to the Arts from the QEII Arts Council, and in 1975 she was made an honorary member of the NZ Society of Potters.

In 1981 she set up the Quarry Arts Centre in Whangarei. It was intended as an arts resource centre, and a place where experimentation could be carried out on New Zealand’s raw materials, our natural resources. Today the Quarry is a well established arts centre running the popular annual Summer Do set up originally by Rust. The Summer Do brings in expert tutors from around the country to run workshops in a variety of disciplines from earth-building to painting, singing, screen-printing, sculpture, pottery, and more.

Rust was awarded the Queens Service Medal in 1983 for Services to Pottery and the Arts, and in 1989 Yvonne Rust, QSM was awarded Life Membership of the Crafts Council for her contribution to art and craft education.

She moved back to her beloved West Coast in 1998, and established the Yvonne Rust West Coast Arts Trust there in 1999. She died on 26 June 2002 in Greymouth.

Her legacy, apart from huge bodies of work in pottery and painting, is in the artists across a wide range of disciplines who today continue to contribute to New Zealand’s culture and heritage. Amongst them: architects, potters, painters, jewellery designers, theatre directors, ballet dancers, arts educators, ceramic artists, and many more.

Yvonne Rust: Maverick Spirit is the detailed biography of this eccentric and original thinker who had an enormous impact on New Zealand culture. The book is available as a lavishly illustrated coffee-table styled book published in print by David Ling Publishing.

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